An hour after announcing his resignation, the US Army Chief of Staff says: “A madman is about to lead the great US military to ruin.”

Paulo Kirk

Apr 04, 2026

Now now, would it not be in everyone’s interest to see the uniformed mercenary services go the way of the dodo?

Smedley Darlington Butler was commissioned in the Marine Corps in 1898 at the age of 16. Two years later, he was promoted to the rank of captain by brevet for his heroic conduct during the Boxer Rebellion in China. He served in nearly every campaign of the Marine Corps from 1898 to 1931^[1]. His first Medal of Honor was awarded in 1914 for “distinguished conduct in battle” during the U.S. occupation of Veracruz, Mexico.^[2] His second Medal of Honor came less than two years later, when he led an attack on Fort Riviere, Haiti. Butler was one of only two Marines to receive two Medals of Honor.^[3]

There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights.

Smedley Butler

After his retirement, Butler became harshly critical of US military involvement abroad and militarism in general. Throughout the early 30’s he toured the country giving lectures advising against US intervention abroad, and criticizing the use of wars for profit by big business. He also harshly criticized the separation between the top and bottom of American Society; between those who paid and fought for wars, and those who led men into war and reaped the profits.

In keeping with these views, Butler publicly supported the demands of the Bonus Army. He went to Washington along with his son, and ate and camped with the soldiers. He spoke before the assembled veterans and told them that they had as much right to lobby congress as any company. When the protestors were forcibly cleared by General MacArthur, Butler identified himself as a “Hoover for Ex-President Republican” and campaigned for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

In 1933 Butler was contacted by a bond trader named Gerald McGuire claiming to be speaking on behalf of a group of powerful businessmen. He approached Butler about leading an army of 500,000 veterans in an attempt to depose President Roosevelt. Butler testified before congress as to what became known as the “Business Plot”. The few businessman who McGuire named as his backers denied any involvement, and modern historians disagree whether any such plot actually existed, or whether Butler was the victim of a con by McGuire.

Regardless, the offer deeply distressed Butler who became suspicious of the power of big business in shaping policy both domestic and foreign, and he became even more zealously anti-militarist and anti-fascist. In 1935 in the socialist newsletter Common Sense Butler reflected on his time in the armed forces, writing:

“I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

Iranian media report that the U.S. pilot was found by Iranian civilians in a cave in southern Iran. They deceived him into believing he would be handed over to U.S. forces, but instead, he was delivered to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps intelligence.

​Following the destruction of 12 aircraft and helicopters by Iran, the US has canceled all flights into Iranian airspace.

Ahh, up up and away: Pentagon requests 38 Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II fighters for U.S. Air Force in 2027 defense budget proposal.

The budget allocates $30.6 billion for Air Force aircraft procurement, marking an increase over previous years. However, it does not specify detailed funding breakdowns for key aircraft programs.

An Office of Management and Budget official confirmed that the Air Force would receive 38 of the 85 F-35 aircraft requested. Analysts said the figure may not be sufficient to address the service’s fighter inventory challenges.

“If the budget does fund 85 F-35s overall, with only 38 going to the Air Force, my reaction is that this is a mixed signal—on one hand, 85 aircraft is still a meaningful production number for the military and it helps preserve industrial-base stability, but on the other hand, 38 for the Air Force is not a serious rebuild rate for a service operating the oldest and smallest fighter force in its history,” said David A. Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. “It may keep the line warm, but it does not reverse the fighter inventory shortfall.”

[A fully self-contained drone manufacturing facility built inside a standard shipping container.]

Oh, that old Putin, Zelensky-ed again. While interceptor drones have become one of the most sought-after commodities of the Iran war, Ukrainian officials and defense practitioners are cautioning allies to recognize that the pace of today’s battlefield requires them to buy into an entirely new system of production alongside the endpoint weapon.

“Expertise is not a drone, but a skill, a strategy, a system where a drone is one part of the defense,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Reuters on Monday.

Ukraine now produces roughly 1,000 interceptor drones a day through hundreds of vetted manufacturers, deliberately dispersed so that no single strike can cripple the supply chain, Zelenskyy reported last month. The country has the technical capacity to double that figure, he said, but lacks the budget to do so.

While Ukraine has built that infrastructure gradually over the last few years, most countries now trying to integrate interceptors into the air defense have not invested in building the necessary logistical framework needed to effectively build, arm or deploy the cheap flyers.

Some countries have already learned this lesson the hard way.

After some Ukrainian companies built interceptor drone factories abroad without state approval, multiple buyers complained because the drones were sold without the warheads or expertise needed to operate them properly, Zelenskyy said on Friday, per Ukrainska Pravda.

“They had also been sold a certain number of interceptors — again without explosives,” Zelenskyy said about a European country he visited recently. “And they asked me whether we could send more operators. I said no.”

Oppen-Monster-Heimers: The UC Berkeley physicist and climate scientist was raised Catholic. He has stated that while he went through a period of being an “enlightened atheist,” he now identifies as someone “aware of the existence of God,” though he does not belong to an organized religion.

Liz Muller convinced her dad Richard to forego retirement and become an entrepreneur. The result is a revolutionary approach to making atomic energy cheaper and safer.

---

For more than a decade, Elizabeth Muller and her father have taken a three-mile hike, usually twice a week, through the hills of Berkeley, California, stopping for coffee and brainstorming on the way. “I would have an idea and she would have an idea,” says Richard A. Muller, who devised the modern carbon dating method used to determine the age of ancient plant and animal remains before he was 33 and won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award at 38. Now, after 40 years of teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, the 82-year-old physicist is on the verge of having his greatest commercial impact, thanks to his business-minded daughter and those long walks.

“Nuclear brings out big emotions on all sides,” says Liz, 47. “As a kid growing up in Berkeley, all my teachers and friends were anti-nuclear, and the city became a nuclear-free zone.” She too leaned anti-nuke, even though her father’s mentor, Nobel Prize winner Luis Alvarez—who worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the first atomic bomb—was “like a grandfather to me.” But after college at UC San Diego, she moved to Paris in 1999 to earn a master’s at ESCP Business School and worked in international finance there for eight years. In France, she explains, everyone supported nuclear power as a “clean, reliable global warming solution.” She returned to Berkeley determined to tap her dad’s genius.

The global oil crisis is turning into an everything crisis

European Parliament member Rima Hassan has been detained in France on suspicion of “apology for terrorism”, French media outlets are reporting, in a move members of her left-wing La France Insoumise (LFI) party say aims to silence Palestine supporters.

APOLOGY for terrorism? Fucking FRANCE is going after her. THAT France:

Le Parisien newspaper reported on Thursday that Hassan was detained in relation to an investigation into a social media post that referenced Kozo Okamoto, who took part in a deadly attack at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport in 1972.

Hassan had deleted the post on X, Le Parisien said.

Jean-Luc Melenchon, the founder of LFI, said in a social media post on Thursday that Hassan’s detention related to a retweet from last month. “So there is no longer parliamentary immunity in France. Intolerable,” he wrote on X.

Le Parisien and the AFP news agency also reported that a small amount of “synthetic drugs” was found on Hassan when she was taken into police custody.

See his Mossad handlers, left and right? Meta is slashing hundreds of employees in Silicon Valley as the tech giant heavily invests in artificial intelligence and weighs axing over 20% of its workforce.

The Facebook parent company is cutting nearly 200 workers in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to new state filings.

The reductions will hit 124 employees in Burlingame, Calif. and another 74 in nearby Sunnyvale, with the cuts taking effect in late May and all affected positions permanently eliminated, filings cited by the San Francisco Chronicle show.

Oh, go team F-35! Who’s putting bets on this? The loss of the American aircraft marks the first time a U.S. fighter jet has been downed in combat in decades. It also challenges Pentagon and White House’s claims that thousands of U.S. and Israeli strikes have wiped out Iran’s missile capabilities.

Iranian firepower also struck a U.S. aircraft dispatched to support the search and rescue mission. That aircraft — a single-seat A-10 Thunderbolt, known as the Warthog — crashed in Kuwaiti airspace after its pilot ejected safely, a U.S. official told NBC News. U.S. military helicopters were also hit by Iranian firepower, but no crew members were injured in the attack.

And so, this is what the Pedophile is interested in? Trump signs order intended to stabilize college sports, threatens to cut funding

Trump went after eligibility rules, transfers and the spiraling costs associated with an industry that now pays its players millions of dollars per year.

Banana Republic with them stuck up our asses. Massive NPS Staffing Cuts Loom as DOI Orders ‘Visitor-Facing’ Realignment and Early Retirement

As the Department of the Interior pushes employees into “visitor-facing” roles and proposes to slash $736 million from the National Park Service budget, critics warn that the scientists and stewards who keep our parks alive are once again being purged.

The everthing is chaos Pedophile and Rapist in Chief. What falling wage growth says about where the U.S. economy is heading

Soaring gas prices mean inflation could soon outpace most Americans’ pay raises. “That’s where you see a lot of squeeze on workers,” said one economist.

Is this a joke? After the release of the Epstein files, why have there been so few arrests?

All governments lie:

All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out. IF Stone

Mothers search in the scrublands, poking the earth for signs of a corpse. Desperate pleas fill social media, crying out for clues that may bring relief. Tattered posters flutter in the wind, asking for help in the search. Often, all that is left of the missing are scattered bones bleached by the sun.

It is arguably Mexico’s greatest human rights crisis. More than 130,000 people have vanished since the state went to war against drug cartels a decade ago. Now, activists and human rights experts say the authorities are trying to erase their loved ones from the record.

The government recently presented a new report which said a third of the country’s missing had actually showed signs of life, while another third lacked sufficient data to be found – causing fury and condemnation from relatives who have spent years searching for their missing.

“What the government is doing is illogical and outrageous,” said María Herrera Magdaleno, a leader in the movement of mothers looking for their missing children: Herrera’s four sons are among the disappeared. “Instead of looking for our disappeared, they’re disappearing them.”

This is the Crusades, man, the Gestapo Crusades:

Blasting begins for border wall on cherished New Mexico mountain

A planned 1.3-mile barrier across Mount Cristo Rey has drawn opposition from environmentalists and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces.

Fucking Democrat Party NANNIES. In a letter obtained exclusively by CBS News, Sen. Tammy Duckworth demanded that TSA immediately rescind its “shoes-on” policy, calling it a “reckless act” that may be placing the flying public at risk.